Chilean court suspends debt collection from Pinochet’s daughter

The Constitutional Court of Chile ssuspended the collection of a million-dollar debt of the daughter of the dictator Augusto Pinochet, Jacqueline, as reported this Wednesday (03.01.2023) in the local press, after accepting an appeal in which he accused the Internal Revenue Service (SII) of charging excessive taxes.

The youngest of the Pinochet Hiriart brothers accused that the collection of more than 3,300 million pesos (more than 3.8 million euros) for a net debt that reached 309 million (about 357,000 euros at today’s exchange rate) was “unfair and abusive of interest”, and that this violates its constitutional guarantees.

According to the brief presented by Jacqueline Pinochet’s lawyers, there was “an artificial increase and disproportionate” with respect to the credits that the Treasury intends to collect, with interest “that multiplies the alleged tax debt by more than eight times, and becomes a flat sanction that produces a substantial dispossession of resources.”

The writ filed with the high court by the daughter of the dictator details other amounts were added to the outstanding debt for readjustments, interest and fines.

The Pinochet Hiriart family has been involved in other conflicts with the SII, such as the accusations of Lucía Pinochet miscalculation of taxes for his father’s inheritance or investigations into the dictator’s own accounts at the Riggs Bank of the United States.